We present MergePoint, a new binary-only symbolic execution system for large-scale and fully unassisted testing of commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) software. MergePoint introduces veritesting, a new technique that employs static symbolic execution to amplify the effect of dynamic symbolic execution. Veritesting allows MergePoint to find twice as many bugs, explore orders of magnitude more paths, and achieve higher code coverage than previous dynamic symbolic execution systems. MergePoint is currently running daily on a 100 node cluster analyzing 33,248 Linux binaries; has generated more than 15 billion SMT queries, 200 million test cases, 2,347,420 crashes, and found 11,687 bugs in 4,379 distinct applications.

In this paper we present Mayhem, a new system for automatically finding exploitable bugs in binary (i.e., executable) programs. Every bug reported by Mayhem is accompanied by a working shell-spawning exploit. The working exploits ensure soundness and that each bug report is security-critical and actionable. Mayhem works on raw binary code without debugging information. To make exploit generation possible at the binary-level, Mayhem addresses two major technical challenges: actively managing execution paths without exhausting memory, and reasoning about symbolic memory indices, where a load or a store address depends on user input. To this end, we propose two novel techniques: 1) hybrid symbolic execution for combining online and offline (concolic) execution to maximize the benefits of both techniques, and 2) index-based memory modeling, a technique that allows Mayhem to efficiently reason about symbolic memory at the binary level. We used Mayhem to find and demonstrate 29 exploitable vulnerabilities in both Linux and Windows programs, 2 of which were previously undocumented.